Review: Acer Aspire R7 tries really hard to address needs no one has

Uncomfortable form factor and haphazard design leave us confused and unsatisfied.

"Infomercial hands." It's a phrase my wife and I use to describe the pose and expression that shows up in the beginning of most infomercials—the ones that start with phrases like, "Are you tired of not being able to pour your soda like a normal human being?" It's always accompanied by footage of people throwing up their hands in disgust after failing to accomplish tasks that most of us can do without any problems.

I get that PC OEMs are facing decreasing margins as non-traditional computing devices continue to gain popularity, and I get that there's shareholder pressure to think of the next big thing in the portable space in order to keep revenue up and hit the quarterly guidance. But the Aspire R7 is unfortunately not the next big thing. I'm not entirely sure what it is, really, or what its target market is, or what particular task or tasks it's supposed to excel at that other devices don't already do better.

We got some hands-on time with the Acer Aspire R7 back in early May, when Ars Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham called it "the strangest convertible PC we've ever seen." Having spent a couple of weeks with the device, I can definitely validate that. In the hours I've spent using it, I never grew wholly comfortable with its layout and function, and I came to resent its weight and overall unfriendliness.

The Aspire R7 is a convertible, that bastard product category that became popular with OEMs after the launch of Windows 8. It features a large 15.6" touchscreen mounted on a double-jointed hinge, called the "Ezel Hinge" by Acer's marketers. The Ezel hinges at both ends, allowing the screen to be raised, lowered, and pivoted. The R7 uses its big hinge to convert between a traditional laptop-like appearance, a keyboard-enhanced tablet-like appearance, a supported tablet, and a full hand-held tablet.

The fact that the device has certain set "modes" into which you are supposed to transform it isn't immediately obvious at first, and so Acer has spent quite a bit of time ensuring that customers understand how the R7 works. Its website contains numerous animations showing the R7 merrily flipping back and forth; the device also came with a pack-in piece of paper graphically explaining its different configurations. New users can even click on a video on the different modes embedded in the Task Bar for reference.

Setting aside the hinge and its implications for a moment, the R7 is certainly not awful hardware. It has a dual-core 1.8GHz Ivy Bridge Core i5-3427U, a low-voltage 22nm CPU with hyperthreading, and a max rated TDP of 17 watts. It has 4GB of soldered-in RAM, and the configuration we reviewed came with its one RAM slot filled with a 2GB SODIMM, yielding an odd-but-not-bad total of 6GB. Its integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU is perfectly adequate for non-hardcore-gamer usage. We would have liked to see the new Haswell CPUs make an appearance, but Ivy Bridge isn't a bad performer.

The laptop/convertible/whatever-we're-calling-these-things defines solidity; it's 5.29 lbs of aluminum, plastic, and glass. The Ezel Hinge and its captive touchscreen lack even a tiny bit of flop or play—the screen moves with balanced authority on the hinge and the hinge in turn pivots against the laptop base with squeak-free smoothness. The screen stayed exactly at whatever angle I positioned it without shifting up or down. In fact, at times it took perhaps too much effort to move the screen, and I'd end up shifting the entire laptop around on its little rubber feet. However, I'd much rather have a hinged display like this sprung on the stiff side than on the loose side.

The display itself is big and bright. The IPS panel supports pretty broad viewing angles, which is important because the R7's shape-changing design means that the screen is likely to be viewed from a wide variety of distances and positions. The LED backlighting was even and without any obvious hot spots or bleeding. Its 10-point capacitive touch layer also gave me no problems—it responded to touches and drags immediately with no noticeable lag.

Unexpectedly, I like the keyboard. I find myself hating most island-style keyboards, but this one's quite nice. The keys take a tiny amount of effort to depress and then instantly descend their full short length to bottom out authoritatively. There's no sense of mush, thank goodness. And the backlight, though it bleeds out from under the keys, is extremely bright at its max setting.

Enlarge/ The weirdly inverted keyboard and trackpad arrangement. I did not like this.

Lee Hutchinson

There are also some fair-sized (for a portable) speakers on the bottom of the device—a pair of 2W "Dolby Home Theater" branded grilles. The audio coming out of them sounded quite clear at low-to-medium volume. I'm not sure that slapping a "Dolby Home Theater" brand on them means you'd want to use them to listen to a movie at full volume, but for casual listening to streamed audio, they were perfectly fine.

That is unfortunately the end of the positive things I have to say about this device. In daily use it performed adequately, but it definitely isn't going to win any awards for speed. I didn't bother running any structured benchmarks because Ivy Bridge is a thoroughly known quantity at this point; all of its hardware is already well-documented. (You can check our Asus ZenBook Prime and 2013 MacBook Air reviews for hard numbers if you want them.)

The lack of an SSD for its primary operating system didn't make as big of an impact as I thought it would—at least, not at first. The R7 comes with a 500GB 5400 rpm hard disk drive, but it's augmented with a 24GB mSATA SSD that functions as a cache for the operating system boot files and for frequently accessed applications. Subjectively, it was slower than using an SSD but much faster than using just the hard disk drive—which I got to learn a lot about.

But, first, let's talk about the R7's flippy screen and hinge. The issue with the R7 is that although it has four primary "forms," it's not particularly useful in any of them—sort of like how Astrotrain wasn't a very good space shuttle, train, or robot.

Seems like a concept car that was brought into production without any adjustments for production realities.

Shipping an Ivy Bridge laptop at this time seems crazy to me. If a particular Haswell isn't available today, just wait a couple of months.

Going 15" over 13" or smaller seems troubling. The form factor would seem great for economy class usage, but 15" is still quite big for most people and useable even for small people when the seat in front of you is reclined.

Than the trackpad. It's like they desperately wanted one. A track point wasn't suitable?

If the display can float a couple inches above the keyboard in Ezel mode perhaps it would make a decent airplane laptop. With the seat in front of you it's impossible to tilt a screen back enough to use a normal laptop.

That said, it's a lot to ask for a computer specifically for food trays in coach on an airplane - especially one that's not ultrabook light and without MacBook Air battery life.

When I saw the picture on the front page, I thought "interesting. That must be a cool hinge to let the screen go over there and also on the other side above the keyboard." Then I read the review, and saw that, no, the screen goes above the trackpad in laptop mode.

*facepalm*

Someone let this thing out the door? On a desk, with a mouse, that arrangement would be fine (and probably preferable), but if you ever want to use it, you know, on your lap, that's insane. There are very good reasons people put the palm-rests around the trackpad.

It looks great to me EXCEPT by having the keyboard behind the trackpad, it totally borks the layout. I would like a full HD 15 inch notebook with those kind of specs and touchscreen. Alas, this wasn't out when I got my Dell XPS 12 but regardless, the keyboard layout would have likely killed it for me. The one thing I wish the XPS 12 had...was a 13-15 inch brother/sister.

Having experience with the XPS 12, the point of tablet mode isn't to be an idiot and hold it out in front of you, you rest it in your lap while you are sitting and then flick away at it like a nice great big tablet. It works fairly well on the XPS 12 but would work so much better with a bigger screen. Frankly, I am very happy I have it (other than the trackpad being a bit hit and miss) and am thankful I didn't go for an even smaller screen in the Lenovo Helix (which I am sure is great for many but would have been not ideal for me).

There is one item in defense of the trackpad position -- I rarely see laptop users who aren't using an external mouse. The touchpad in the center next to the user isn't comfortable either, we've just grown acclimated to it being there. But at the same time, I doubt anyone would buy a laptop, even a touch screen laptop running Win8, without some sort of token mouse built in.

All in all though, it sounds like they were trying to hard to make it work with Windows 8, so like the OS, the hardware is neither fish nor fowl but an uneasy hybrid.

What's bad about the keyboard being "too close to the edge"? Every desktop keyboard is just like that. Is it really just the lack of a wrist pad that's the issue?

Not so much the lack of wristpad, more the distance from your body to the keyboard.

A desktop keyboard sits on your desk, and you can adjust your seat as near/far as you like so that you have enough room for your forearms for comfortable use.

With a laptop/notebook you have to accept that people will use it on their laps - but still need to have enough space to accommodate your forearms for comfortable use.

This space is typically provided by the area where the trackpads sits on a conventional notebook.But on this model - because the keyboard is so close - you have to create that space yourself by pushing the keyboard away from you... until it tips off your lap and onto the floor.

Unless you want to do all your typing with your wrists tucked tight up close against your stomach.

In defense of the keyboard position - on a desk I think it's a better place for it to be than at the back of the notebook.

But on a lap, sure, not a great place - I guess this isn't a laptop then. In addition the trackpad is just in a silly position as a result. Maybe it should flip out from the laptop on the right (or left) into a far nicer position for right (or left) handed use.

How robust it the hinge - I've had laptops where the first failure point is weak hinges (HP, I'm looking at you here). This looks quite robust to me.

You got my hopes up! From the description, I was expecting that the hinge had some kind of telescoping element, so that the screen could be raised up above table-level... You know, like a real computer monitor, instead of having to stare DOWN all the time, and look at the screen just over my knuckles. But sadly it does not, and has an even WORSE mode where you can move it closer to your fingers... A valuable features for orangutans, but an anti-feature for humans.

Why the hell are laptops still so much ergonomically worse than desktops after all these years? My setup would work perfectly... I use a flat, mini-keyboard without a num pad, a trackball, and a modest sized monitor 5 inches off the desk, and 2'+ away from me. After decades of development, why can't ANY laptops do this?

Sounds like the trackpad behind the keyboard is there way of saying "you don't need this trackpad thing ... come and touch my screen, but we're going to pack in the trackpad so we don't upset the trackpad demographic."

Reason 2 would be lazy designing. Because of the hinge that's the only place it would fit so they just shoved it there. Same goes for the speaker under the computer. It's like if someone tried to use a flashlight while it was still in their pocket.

I don't think the actual concept is bad. How about someone make a case which allows me to attach an existing tablet into the place of the screen on this? Make the keyboard/trackpad Bluetooth and put a battery in the bottom for optionally charging the tablet (if you want the cables lying around).

I'd buy that. As it stands I use a normal BT keyboard and a stand so I can set the tablet up as a little PC type setup but having it all integrated and portable would be very useful...

This reminds me of two products I want from Apple, but they seem determined to not deliver: A Macbook Air with a touchscreen that can go into tablet mode over the keyboard, and an iMac with a touchscreen.

I know OSX and iOS are not the same, but I find touchscreens and macs in general are better for consumptive purposes in my uses, and Win7 is what I use for mouse and keyboard productive uses. At least Acer is trying to find a way to build a device with computer power in a tablet form factor, even if this sounds like more of a swing and a miss than a hit.

What's bad about the keyboard being "too close to the edge"? Every desktop keyboard is just like that. Is it really just the lack of a wrist pad that's the issue?

Not so much the lack of wristpad, more the distance from your body to the keyboard.

A desktop keyboard sits on your desk, and you can adjust your seat as near/far as you like so that you have enough room for your forearms for comfortable use.

With a laptop/notebook you have to accept that people will use it on their laps - but still need to have enough space to accommodate your forearms for comfortable use.

Unless you want to do all your typing with your wrists tucked tight up close against your stomach.

So can't you just much the laptop four inches further away, since you can move the screen four inches closer to you?

If you have your own laptop, try it.With the screen open, can you move it 4" off your knees and away from your body before it starts to tip over? (but be careful to catch it!)

And this model has a heavy hinge fitted to the screen, which makes the weight distribution biased even more towards the rear, which is even worse for use on your lap.

4" may be 40% of the chassis of this laptop, but because of the weight distribution it's almost certainly well over 50% of the weight that's unsupported by your legs, and that makes it tip over and fall to the floor.

What's bad about the keyboard being "too close to the edge"? Every desktop keyboard is just like that. Is it really just the lack of a wrist pad that's the issue?

It's not a desktop. It's a laptop. You can use the desk for your palms. But if you use this on your lap, it's goi g to be very difficult. Your palms help to stabilize the laptop on your lap. When the keyboard is at the front, you can't do that. In addition, you need to push the laptop further from you, meaning that it will be on your knees. And then, what about the trackpad?

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.